The Wheat and the Tares

"The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a man who sowed good seed in his field, but while his men were sleeping, his enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat and went away. So when the plants came up and bore grain, then the weeds appeared also. And the servants of the master of the house came and said to him, ‘Master, did you not sow good seed in your field? How then does it have weeds?’ He said to them, ‘An enemy has done this.’ So the servants said to him, ‘Then do you want us to go and gather them?’ But he said, ‘No, lest in gathering the weeds you root up the wheat along with them. Let both grow together until the harvest, and at harvest time I will tell the reapers, Gather the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn.’"

This parable, from Matthew 13, makes some more sense to us now. Our spelt grew tall, but the weeds grew taller. We should have harvested it several weeks ago, I think. Phil went to scythe it down (the usual method of harvest), and the heads shattered, or split open, so that none was left on the stalks.

Next he tried to machete it down, handful by handful. But this wasn't great. He tried to cut the stalks with a knife, but that was very slow. Next he tried harvesting by hand.

In the end, I put on gloves and stripped the stalks, with the grains dumped into a 5-gallon bucket. I didn't try to get it all. Phil came behind with the scythe, so that while I captured much of the grain, he cut down the weedy growth.

I'm thankful we don't have to rely on our harvest for all our bread for the next year. I mean, it was a fine harvest, but it wouldn't feed us all, even if we could extract the kernels easily from the husks.

I'm thankful that we didn't have a large area to harvest. And it worked pretty well: in an hour or two, we found 16 hidden eggs, have a couple of feedbags of unhusked spelt, and our hillside is covered with a thick layer of mulch.

We were thrilled with the incredible clover we found growing happily under our spelt. (A few sections had wild roses instead of clover; roses are not good for animals.) Another reason to be happy for the pigs plowing last year: they did a good job fertilizing the land.

Phil noticed today that the top two rows of trees, the ones that we planted into enormous holes with extra minerals have shot ahead of our other trees. They are doing really well. He said, "We should have planted them all like that!" I don't know if I would have survived.

We can't be sure, though, that the planting method was the main benefit. Those trees are meant to be precocious, so they will produce early. He shoveled about 500 pounds or so of minerals onto the base of about 50 trees; a good start to the extra minerals we want to spread on all our orchard. It's been on my "to do" list for some time, but Phil caught the vision.

To join our broody barn hen (above), I added a dozen eggs under the original broody hen (below).

We thought she was crazy; she would lay an egg every day on the empty tote from our minerals. One day, she just started to hang out all the time on the tote, but never laid an egg. We were actually a little upset with her, the slacker! But now that we have a better understanding of what's going on, maybe she'll produce some chicks for us. We're making sure she has food and water nearby. I suspect she's getting hungry.

The trauma of the day happened early this morning. Even though the pigs don't leave the electric net outside their pen, we'd really prefer that they stay in their cattle panel pen. I went to help drive the two piglets back into the cattle panels. The electric fence was off, when Princess Buttercup went a little too close and caught her ear tag in the netting. She immediately started screaming, which is one of the world's worst sounds. I couldn't get her untangled, and the more she pulled, the worse her ear felt. I grabbed her back legs, and then one got caught in the fence, which pulled her poor ear even worse.

I was shaking by the time Phil got to me (probably only a few seconds later, really) and untangled her foot and her ear, and put her into the pen.

Isaiah and Abraham helped me pull some more garlic. We had a good time trying to see who would pull the largest head.

I weighed my elephant garlic today, and I harvested 4 lb, 6 oz from the original pound. The catalog says that the garlic should yield 8 to 1 under good conditions. With just over half that "expected" yield, I suppose I have plenty of room for improvement. But how great to have a crop at all!

Tom the pig breeder told us about some of the predator issues he's had to deal with. We left his farm yesterday filled with incredible awe at the very gracious protection the Lord has placed over our farm this first year. We are thankful for the chickens yet alive; for the chicks who survived their gestation and first day; for the lack of vicious dogs who would run our sheep to death; for only minor damage from deer.

Thank you, brothers and sisters, for your prayers on our behalf. We don't always realize the Lord's protection against destruction, but it is present, and we are thankful.